


told my garden yet

by Catherines_Collections



Series: inventing your presence [2]
Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Codependency, F/F, Love/Hate, Post-Fever Era, Pretty Odd. borederline, Unhealthy Relationships, the fine line between adoration and strangulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-16 09:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17547242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: Too often, Ryan thinks she’s more violence than girl.





	told my garden yet

**Author's Note:**

> hello. yes, this has been four months in the making.
> 
> I own nothing. Title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem.

 

 

Ryan can’t track it.

She can’t push her pen down into their interviewer’s thigh and write it all out, record the pattern threatening to implode.

Ryan’s shaking in place, hands on the metaphoric wheel and eyes on the symbolic sun, fingers pressing crescents into her arms while Spencer says something profound and she wants to be in the bus, in Nevada, anywhere but by the camera and boys and media pressing her down every corner.

Ryan has three magic acts, two weapon hands, and a pied piper with a smile of silver and voice of gold that bleeds rubies when she asks it to. But four of them are still playing the game after she’s lit the match. Brendon says she shouldn’t play with fire this close.

Spencer says she isn’t careful.

Brendon brushes her hand on the tour bus afterwards and Ryan douses the match, doesn’t listen.

There’s a rule, somewhere, she thinks Spencer’s probably got about four print copies, that says to be careful with what you do have to make room for what you don’t. Somewhere else, maybe, it applies.

Here, Brendon crawls out of her buck and into Ryan’s and sighs when Ryan pulls her against the wall. Ryan buries the matches where Brendon can’t see them, lit and leering, and Brendon fits herself into the keyhole separating them from the outside- the breakeven between the lock and its opening.  
  
It’s Bren versus _Pop_ , Ryan versus _Teen Vogue_ , Bren against the wall, Bren anywhere Ryan can fit her as long as she can have her, never close enough.

Ryan traces the bruises scattered across Brendon’s shoulders, down her back, shadowed towards her ribs, and thinks, _maybe_. Maybe, next time, she’ll melt the cameras before anyone catches her.

 

.

 

Ryan knows she’ll be a wash up before she’s thirteen.

At twelve she’s knobby kneed and music literature and tracing the outlines of her vinyls on her bed with the door locked shut.

Spencer comes over on Tuesday’s after school, and Ryan spends the rest of the evening teaching Spencer everything’s she’s been reading about music theory and the Beatles early influence during gym while Spencer looks on.

After, Spencer says, “You should be a teacher.”

It’s funny enough that Ryan laughs. She shakes her head and tucks her Smiths record back into its case. She places it behind her vanity and away from her mother’s snooping gaze.

Spencer doesn’t get the joke.

“You would kill it,” Spencer says, undeterred and wide-eyed, with a double sword for a tongue. Ryan hates when she gets like this; when she acts like Ryan’s something far enough away that Spencer can’t touch herself.

Ryan doesn’t say it, though. She sits back and brushes Spencer’s arm, says, “No. I don’t think I could talk about music all day and not play it.”

Spencer hums but looks away. She doesn’t get it, but it’s alright. Later, she plays Spencer the beginnings of something she’s composing on her guitar.

Spencer calls it their first practice a week later when she tells Ryan she wants to start a band. Two months after she invites Bren. Six more and a contract constriction later, Ryan starts to wonder where Brendon ends and she begins.

Ryan never does thank her.

 

.

 

Brendon’s laughing and Ryan wants to tear it out of her.

The real sound, not the one Brendon makes up just for interviews and then spins them into something like light.

They’re making more press releases now then they are albums, and she feels like she’s drowning in the same way Brendon’s thriving from it. Ryan’s cornered by the camera, Brendon’s in the front smiling, and Spencer’s yawning at her side while Jon smiles from the back.

Brendon laughs at something the reporter’s said and Ryan wants to smash the camera until they can’t use any of it, feels the matches burning a hole against her pocket.

Spencer spares her a glance that’s more concern than a glare and she doesn’t return it. She likes Spencer better when she’s not snooping, when she plays alongside Ryan’s game the same way Brendon’s learned to hone it.

There’s a melody buzzing in the back of her skull and she wants to write it out on her fingers, across the glaring lighting sheet they pull out just for these interviews. There’s something angry electric bleeding down her arms from her neck, buzzing so hard she thinks she must be vibrating.

She wonders how long it’ll be until everyone sees how she’s more beast than girl.

Brendon’s a good cover for the magazines, but Ryan didn’t spend months in her bedroom composing their first album just to become the media’s latest play thing.

Brendon smiles for the cameras in all the right places, blushes and stutters her way through interviews, and it’s endearing in a way Ryan can’t master. Jon makes adds a short joke and everyone eats it up like they’re starving for something to leach onto. Ryan wants to shatter every screen in the room.

Brendon says, “In our new album we wanted our fans to really embrace themselves. We put our blood, sweat, and tears into it and we hope it shows.”

The reporters asks something else and Spencer fills in. Brendon laughs, again, a joke, something dry Spencer’s said, and the kid lights up like it means something. Ryan feels feral, closed in.

Blood, Brendon had said. Ryan knows a lot about the blood.

She has some of Brendon’s under her fingernails, drawn in lines down her back and buried under her shirt.

Ryan’s got a lot of blood stained to her fists. Spencer says she has an anger problem. Spencer doesn’t know what it means to be a ghost in her own body, so Ryan doesn’t say things out loud anymore.

The interviewer thanks them as the camera crew packs up and Brendon’s smile doesn’t fade an inch when she promises more info next time and the crew lights up.

And it’s alright, really. How easy Brendon plays into their hands, fits the role of stardom so smoothly it’s like she shaped it herself. Ryan’s fuse lit itself somewhere along the way when it stopped being fun and started being Brendon’s job to calm around its cool off.

Ryan’s always been an Icarus and Brendon’s not looking to get burned.

 

.

 

They end up in the bathroom afterwards, of course.

The cameras cleared away and Spencer and Jon disappear for something neither of them care enough about to remember.

They’re a cliche on the count down and Ryan doesn’t have to do much more than pull Brendon’s hand in the direction behind the studio booth before she’s following. It’s a misdirection on the intended path because Ryan knows better than to pretend she’s the leader of any of this.

Corner cleared, Brendon pulls the door closed, locks it, and Ryan pushes her against the wall and still can’t get close enough. Ryan kisses down her neck, to her collarbone, onto her stomach and thighs once her knees hit the floor.

Brendon’s braced against the sink, fingers woven in Ryan’s hair. She’s swollen lips and dark eyes, stardom and its brink, heart worn on her sleeve and everything Ryan wishes she could let herself hate.

Brendon’s the star and Ryan’s her refraction hitting the light wrong. When Ryan leans forward and tilts her head to the left Brendon yelps and pulls her hair. Her thighs shake and Ryan hooks them over her shoulder.  
  
“You don’t do this to all your other favorites, do you?” Brendon pants, one hand in Ryan’s hair and the other bracing the sink.  
  
And it’s a joke, Ryan knows. Everyone knows she’s been revolving around Brendon since she came into the picture. There never could be anyone else, no room for more chances than they gave each other, and that’s maybe the problem.

It’s a joke and it’s obvious from the way Brendon’s grip slackens down to the crooked lines of her mouth. But it burns going down, red hot and furious and Ryan wants to slam her against the wall until she gets it. Gets how much she’s going to be is already more than Ryan ever is and that everyone sees it, too. Sometimes, like this, Ryan thinks she’s more violence than girl.

The cameras are gone but she still feels too vulnerable, too open for all the glass around them to capture right.  
  
Brendon’s quiet when she finishes. Brendon loses her name and Ryan loses track of the numbers on the scale, loses every form of ‘stilted’ any magazine’s every called her.

She tightens her grip and sighs where Ryan almost wants her to scream. Later, she knows that when she turns her back to the mirror she’ll be able to see the scratch marks Brendon left. They’re not tallies, there’s no score to keep in a game she’s not going to be caught playing, but she counts them just the same.

Ryan unhooks Brendon’s legs from her shoulders and slides her to the floor and she pulls Ryan up to meet her lips with both hands cupping her cheeks.

Too many times Ryan wants to kiss and kill her in the same breath. Brendon looks at her like she’s not seeing what’s right in front of her. She’s seeing stadiums and albums and contracts Ryan doesn’t have but Brendon will get them all within a month.

Ryan wants to bite Brendon’s neck hard enough to bruise, say _I’ve been here_ and _I’m not done_ in the same mark, so she does.

She doesn’t know when Brendon became the thing she couldn’t get close enough to touch herself and Brendon doesn’t give her the time to ask.  
Brendon pulls her back against her lips, and it’s too tender for what they’re doing to each other, but Brendon laughs softly against her mouth and Ryan’s still not tired of being greedy yet.

Brendon smiles and her lipgloss is smeared across her cheek. She looks like sex, like Ryan’s heart on exhibit and it shakes her more than she thought it would.  
  
Ryan pulls her up and wants to say something about the violence but she thinks she’ll put it in a song instead.

When they end up back in the studio, the buses pulling up and cameras pulling away, she doesn’t meet Spencer’s stare.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed & comments and kudos are very much appreciated <3.


End file.
